It’s no secret that Bill Belichick’s Patriots ran an up-tempo offense last year: Tom Brady and crew ran 1,191 offensive plays in 2012, just eight shy of tying the record set by the Drew Bledsoe Patriots in 1994. With versatile players like Aaron Hernandez, Rob Gronkowski, and Danny Woodhead, New England was capable of running out of multiple formations without changing personnel and uses that flexibility to prevent defenses from substituting players based on down and distance. As a result, New England ran 31 more plays than any other team and 101 more plays than any other team that had a positive Game Scripts average. We would expect some teams with negative Game Scripts — especially when they have Matthew Stafford and Andrew Luck — to run a lot of plays late in games as they play catch up, which makes the Patriots’ offensive play numbers even more impressive.

New England ran an offensive play every 24.9 seconds, the highest rate in the league. The Saints were second at 26.1, which makes sense: New Orleans also has an MVP quarterback and versatile weapons at tight end (Jimmy Graham) and running back (Darren Sproles). You might be a little surprised to see Joe Flacco’s Ravens come in at #3 in play tempo, but the Ravens finished in the bottom five last year in time of possession. The Eagles will be running a high-octane offense under Chip Kelly in 2013, but Philadelphia already ranked fourth in tempo last year.

Here’s how to read the table below. In 2012, the Patriots ranked 1st in tempo (i.e., seconds per play). New England had an average Time of Possession of 30:56 and ran 1,191 offensive plays, an average of one play every 24.9 seconds. The Patriots Game Script average was 7.7, and New England ran 21.3% of their plays in the 1st quarter, 24.9% in the 2nd quarter, 27% in the 3rd quarter, 25.8% in the 4th quarter, and 0.9% in overtime.

It’s no surprise to see Seattle and San Francisco at the bottom of the table in seconds per play. Both teams had run-heavy offenses last year, were often playing with the lead, and had high-completion percentages when they did pass. Seeing the Chargers at #30 is a bit surprising, however. While San Diego was playing with the lead more often than you might expect, it sure felt like Philip Rivers and the offense was simply going through the motions. New head coach in Mike McCoy might instill a greater sense of urgency in the Chargers in 2013. McCoy’s old team, the Denver Broncos, ranked just 10th in tempo, which is what happens when you mix John Fox with Peyton Manning; it will be interesting to see whether the addition of Wes Welker will increase the Broncos’ offensive tempo in 2013.

I have time of possession data going back to 1991. Where does New England’s average of one play every 24.9 seconds rank over the last 22 years? Fourth, behind two Jim Kelly/K-Gun Buffalo Bills teams and a different Drew Bledsoe/Bill Parcells Patriots squad. The table below shows the tempo for each team going back to 1991.

At the bottom of the list were a couple of Saints teams, highlighted by the ’92 version of the Dome Patrol. That team went 12-4, ranked 1st in points allowed, passing yards allowed, and net yards per pass allowed, and sent four linebackers to the Pro Bowl. But the team’s offensive philosophy was to milk the clock, as the Saints ran just 895 plays that year.

Adam Gase, the Denver offensive coordinator, has already been saying that he wants to up the tempo this season. He actually was saying that even before the Welker acquisition, though I’m sure adding Welker will help him realize that goal (assuming it’s not just talk, which is always possible).

Chase Stuart

Yep – the less Foxy the offense, the better.

Shattenjager

Definitely. Now if only he didn’t get to make 4th down and two-point decisions . . .

http://milehighreport.com Topher Doll

Was the 2012 Broncos tempo actually slower than Peyton’s time with Colts or were they similar? It’s not really like the Broncos ran a slow offense last season, a big part of it may be that the Broncos played with the lead for so long, (3rd highest) may factor into that as well.

Fox is a very conservative coach, but I doubt he had much say in that offense once the game started, Peyton pretty much runs that show.

I enjoyed this but I wonder how useful it is. I wonder if we went back a significant number of years (5 or more) and we compared to tempo to record or points per game what the correlation would be. I really don’t think up tempo means more wins if we examine a large sample size, but I haven’t done the numbers yet.

Richie

The idea of incomplete passes helping the tempo got me to wondering if that kind of tempo has any relevance.

Generally, tempo tends to refer to an offense running play after play, which limits the defense’s ability to substitute and/or tires the defensive players out. For instance, a team that has back-to-back running plays that gain 10 yards each might have 40 seconds of clock time between them; but a team with a couple of short completions where the receiver runs out of bounds might only have 5 or 10 seconds between them. But those passes might have 40 or 50 seconds of real time between them due to clock stoppage.

It would be cool, though I assume impossible, to see a tempo based on “real time”.

http://milehighreport.com Topher Doll

That’s a good point, and that leads to other thoughts, especially for certain offenses that rely on big play potential from their QB’s but who can also throw a lot of incompletions. A team could have a very high tempo score because they have an inaccurate QB who can make an occasional big play. The increased number of incompletions keeps the time per play down and the big plays helps compensate. We could apply this to teams lead by a QB like Warren Moon who could make those huge plays but also was known to be streaky in terms of accuracy. In more recent memory the Tim Tebow 2011 Broncos might also apply since they had also had a very high plays per minute (1017 plays and a 29:04 TOP).

It is interesting to see some of the things that might go into affecting this metric.

Chase Stuart

I think last year’s Ravens would meet that definition, too.

I’m not sure about the old Oilers teams, though. Moon was very accurate and Houston had more of a horizontal passing attack.

Chase Stuart

Yeah, it would be cool to see “real-time tempo” but that’s definitely a pipe dream for now. Easy to track if you have the resources and desire, but I don’t know if anyone on the planet meets those two criteria.

9 of your top 10 tempo teams were also in the top 10 in the league as far as total incompletions . I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I don’t think this is a very valid statistic.

Chase Stuart

It is definitely not a coincidence that teams that throw incomplete passes tend to have no time come off the clock between plays.

Nick Bradley

This is a terrible statistic – it doesn’t tell you anything about tempo — it basically tells you about how often the clock stops due to an incomplete pass or an out of bounds play. Its silly.

A true measure of tempo is average time remaining on the play clock per snap.

Dan

Chase,

Read your blog all the time since you generally come up with interesting and robust analysis, but I have to agree this isn’t your finest.

I think the right measure here isn’t “game time” or “real time” or “total plays” though; to do this analysis you would need to see how much play clock a team used on average which is likely not available. This would control for incompletions and length of play (which is clearly a secondary effect but would have an impact on your measure of tempo).